Descartes Meditation in First Philosophy

Meditations on First Philosophy

        Rene Descartes is often credited with being the father of modern day Philosophy.  This is self evident through his personal ideology and beliefs.  He was the first to break free from the traditional Scholastic-Aristotelian Philosophy, which relied heavily upon human sensory perception.  His reasoning behind this was that the more traditional model was prone to doubt, giving way to fallible, existential perceptions.  Descartes, in turn, conjured a more controversial, yet simplistic, idea known as the mechanistic model, which relies heavily instead upon truth with no room for doubt or error based upon deceptive sensations.  In his model we can see that a human only exists through thought, I think, without relying on external influences as well as sensory perceptions; these are his fundamental principles of existence, which I feel need further clarification in order to be fully understood.  In this paper, we will examine Descartes’ I think therefore I am theory as well as its root, and explain the correlation it has with his proof of god’s existence.

        During the first and second meditations, we tackle his observations of sensory perception and how they lead someone to question what is fact or fiction.  It is said the senses deceive and are prone to error through touch, smell, sight and so on; he gives further reasoning in reference to dreams, where we sense that what we are perceiving in dreams is real, even though in actuality it is not.  Through his own personal meditations, he shows us that the body is constantly  

interpreting its own environment; however, it leaves room for many errors and at times these errors are heavily deceiving, leading the mind to a false perception of what is actually real.  Such falsehoods, he feels, should not be trusted and do little, if anything at all, to help the mind, which is the real stem of our existence. This assertion is further explained and solidified with his wax argument, which justifies and clarifies the point that only true thought can be trusted.

        In Descartes’ explanation and precise detail of the piece of wax he uses as an example, his point in justifying the assertion that the senses are fallible becomes clearer.  He takes an ordinary, fresh piece of wax, which still has its original smell, shape, and so on but places it by the fire.  After a few minutes, the original piece of wax slowly loses all of the initial characteristics we all know to be attributed to this object.  The point here is that our senses judge and perceive everything as they would but after the wax changes from its original state is it not still wax, even though it lost some of the initial qualities we would consider wax?  This brings up a very good point because our minds know it is still wax despite our senses feeling, smelling, and seeing something different; the same can be said about what we perceive in a dream state.  These are the roots for Descartes’ I think therefore I am theory, which is one of his founding principles of ideology.